It invokes code that was in the original WitP. US CAs, CLs, Austrialian CAs, and CVs lost in the first year or two of the war were replaced with a ship of the same name and of a current US ship class. For example lost CVs were respawned as Essex class carriers.

This was turned off by default in AE development and all the historic hulls were included with a roman numeral II after their name, though the name can be changed by the player before it enters the game if they want to.

Gary Grigsby's argument was that the US ship building industry had essentially infinite capacity and could replace lost ships with new ones as needed. The AE team took a different approach that the US ship building industry was working max out and they were able to replace ships lost with new ones, but only be renaming ships under construction and pushing the original names down the queue.

Yep, in WITP players would sacrifice their carriers so they could get Essex replacements in 18 months - they also trained their pilots on ground attack against rear bases, and produced ace fighter pilots that way

AE fixed many things

now please fix japanese production, make separate steel and aluminum HI points, so japanese can't cancel ships and use the HI to build airplanes (you can't melt down yamato and use steel to build zeroes.. it's just not possible)